Brundige named Historian of Year

The 2013 St. Joseph County Historical Society’s Historian of the Year award was presented to Kathy Brundige, who received it at a special luncheon held Sunday in Centreville.

By Laura KurellaJournal correspondent

The 2013 St. Joseph County Historical Society’s Historian of the Year award was presented to Kathy Brundige, who received it at a special luncheon held Sunday in Centreville.

Brundige was selected for the award for her work gathering, sorting and compiling a compendium of one-room school memorabilia in the county.

Brundige has been researching and collecting photographs, attendance lists, program books and anything associated with the St. Joseph County schools.

She organized, by township, all the information and placed it in notebooks that will be available for researchers in the historical societies at the museum in Centreville.

Brundige is also digitizing the materials so that they can be made available electronically.

Starmann said the society was very grateful for Brundige’s efforts.

“We have to thank her for her hours and hours of organization and researching information for our county and what she has done to organize it,” Starmann said. “She deserves the Historian of the Year award.”

After a few niceties were exchanged, which included “Thank you very much!” from Brundige, Starmann told her she could present her program. Brundige said, “I was shaking before, and now I’m worse.”

Addressing the group, Brundige said, “If I get a little shaky, just bear with me, because I am not a speaker.”

Brundige said the compilation of memorabilia was started a long time ago.

“1967 is when some of the papers were marked,” she said, “which makes us lucky because if people didn’t start saving papers and taking pictures of the one-room school houses in the ’60s, we wouldn’t have anything about them today. A lot of them simply don’t exist anymore.”

The passion in Brundige’s voice told of her journey in creating the collection echoed the sentiments that are at the core of the St. Joseph County Historical Society.

One recent project, which was mention at this event by Starmann, is the moving of the Worden School, which will be moved across the street from the present school in Burr Oak.

A “Buy a Brick” program has been established to help fund it and those interested in learning more about this and other ways to support the county’s history are asked to contact Starmann at (269) 483-7122.

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